The relationship between heterosexual male painters and their nude female subjects has often been a matter of concern for the wives of said painters. In Jami Attenberg’s first novel, “The Kept Man” (Riverhead, 304 pages, $24.95), the wife of a painter who has lain in a coma for six years confronts evidence that her husband slept with his subjects, and that her friends helped conceal his philandering. Ms. Attenberg is a confident, capable writer, and her debut is a sober examination of two persistently vexing human endeavors: art and marriage. Jarvis Miller’s husband Martin was a rising young star in the New York art world when he collapsed one day in his studio and “entered — entered, like through a door, that’s the only way to explain it, in one door, though never out the other — his coma.” Over the next six years, as Jarvis lived a celibate and dedicated life tending to him (“I have made my life the business of Martin. … I’ve never found another way to spend my time that made me as happy”), Martin’s work appreciated substantially in value and Jarvis became rich but melancholy, unable to make “any serious emotional connections with anyone.” She spends her days grimly trying to be “Jackie O., the ultimate widow. Sexy, yet pristine. Well-mannered. Graceful.”

While doing laundry one afternoon, she meets Scott, Mal, and Tony, three men who have formed a kind of support group they call the Kept Men Club: “We all stay at home while our wives work. We are bon vivants,” they tell Jarvis, which actually just means they meet at the laundromat once a week to commiserate about their squandered talents and ambitions. Perhaps a bit too eagerly, they invite Jarvis to join (“The only thing is — you can’t tell our wives anything we talk about”), and her interactions with — and attractions to — each of these men signal the beginning of the end of her martyrdom to the memory of Martin Miller. Hastening that process is Jarvis’s discovery that her husband’s infidelity was hushed up for six years by her only remaining friends: Martin’s old buddy Davis and his stone-hearted dealer Alice, about whom Jarvis muses, “I’m not sure if she has a vagina.”

Some readers may note that “The Kept Man” calls to mind “The Great Man,” Kate Christensen’s recent novel about three women looking back on the life of the womanizing painter they loved. The two novels complement each other well. Although they bear significant superficial similarities — each expounds on the thresholds of tolerance women have for the sexual appetites of male artists; each describes its New York setting with the familiarity of an aging lover; each relishes its languid, lavish descriptions of elaborate meals — their authors have taken very different stylistic approaches.

While Ms. Christensen told her story expansively, with an omniscient third-person voice and an abundance of narrative vicissitudes, Ms. Attenberg tends to look inward. She is less concerned with plot (in terms of creating, as John Updike put it, a “suspenseful and surpriseful narrative”) than with character, and so we spend a lot of time inside her protagonist’s head; “The Kept Man” might fairly be described as wanderings peppered with recollections. Jarvis lives in a nunnery of her own construction, and she’s clawing the walls. “I love men who love women. Because I am a woman who loves men,” she says, but unfortunately her favorite man has become an emotional albatross that prevents her from establishing genuine intimacy with the non-comatose

Ms. Attenberg writes with equal skill about the inextinguishable allure of infidelity (“I had felt it, too, that dark hole, sealed up for a moment inside of me, only to breathe again. … And I felt it now, breathing so heavy inside of me”) and about the excruciating experience of discovering that you have been betrayed (“It starts with the cells, one by one, I can feel the individual chill, and then all at once they are collectively freezing, and then they are frozen, and chills shoot through my body, and I am hard now, a hard, frozen woman….”) Her prose is vivid, specific, thoroughly considered, and easy to read.

If “The Kept Man” has flaws, they tend to be of ambition rather than execution. Because the novel is determinedly introspective and generally unleavened by humor — and because its plot is driven more by contemplation than incident — a reader will encounter few surprises. Nevertheless, one finds a great deal to admire here; certainly “The Kept Man” is an above-average first novel. Ms. Attenberg, via Jarvis, has a wise, wounded, and empathetic voice, and, more important, she is an able geographer of emotional landscapes. What “The Kept Man” lacks in visceral thrills it makes up for with riches of insight.

Mr. Antosca last wrote for these pages on Peter Høeg. His first novel, “Fires,” was published by Impetus Press.